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Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

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Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#241

Post by jogjayr »

FundThrowaway wrote: post #233
moduspol wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a pet theory that when people interview they bring this buried frustration into the room with them and use the interviewing process to play the part of the people they feel humiliated them. I think it's possible--but there was an experiment someone ran a few years ago with a guy applying to jobs in both software development and management (while qualified for both and resumes optimized for each). One of the…

> and there's more genuine fear of hiring someone who can't fizzbuzz. I always hear this fear proclaimed but have never heard an actual story of a candidate failing to fizzbuzz, would love to hear an anecdote or two from anyone who has one.

I have both once failed fizzbuzz in an interview and gotten offers from FAANG companies (different interviews, obviously). At the time I failed the fizzbuzz, I even knew it was a fizzbuzz question i.e. I'd read Jeff Atwood or Joel Spolsky's blogpost introducing the concept. I just got very very nervous. I work at Google now.

There's not much to say really. I think people for like me who get very nervous at live coding interviews, the variation between best and worst performance can be massive.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#242

Post by rf15 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #115
pinewurst wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like military academy (or fraternity) hazing. You've been abused, therefore you want to pass the load of that abuse on. Maybe you delude yourself into calling it "tradition" or "high standards" or maybe you're just honest and enjoy the sadism of it all.

I can't speak on how solid this research was, but I remember reading a book (one of Cialdini's, I think), that explained hazing behaviour as group cohesion enhancers. Basically, what you suffer during initiation will make your bond with the group much stronger. I suppose there might be something to it, given how prevalent such practices are all around the world, in all cultures.

There's enough people out there who take this more as a hint that this is an inherently hostile environment through and through and just close themselves off forever/become closet hostile towards all members of the group

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#243

Post by jogjayr »

guelo wrote: post #216
commandlinefan wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some jobs require performance under pressure, but programming is not one of them. In fact, programming under pressure is the leading cause of programming disasters. It's the exact opposite of what a rational employer should want.

Not to defend that interviewer, but sometimes it's inevitable that you do have to code under pressure. I've been in situations where the whole system is collapsing, thousands of dollars are being lost every second, and I have to push a patch to production as quickly possible. Not that I would interview for such a situation.

You should probably roll back the commit that broke production though, instead of hastily pushing something out hoping you'll fix it.

And ideally you should've been doing a gradual rollout, deploying on a few machines first then slowly ramping it up.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#244

Post by jogjayr »

corey_moncure wrote: post #128
8_hours_ago wrote: post #123

I recently interviewed at Apple and one interviewer caused me to decide to never work there. I was put into a conference room and had 8 people over 6 hours come in and interview me one after another. Each person asked me about my background and then jumped into a whiteboard coding problem. Most of the interviewers were understanding of the fact that writing code on a whiteboard is nothing like writing code on a compu…

So you met 8 people, and one of them was a jerk? I'd say that's a pretty acceptable jerk coefficient for a workplace. I've been in places north of 0.5.

They were a jerk in a situation where both parties are supposed to be on their best behavior. Can you imagine how it must be dealing with them on a day-to-day basis?

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#246

Post by skewart »

FundThrowaway wrote: post #233
moduspol wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a pet theory that when people interview they bring this buried frustration into the room with them and use the interviewing process to play the part of the people they feel humiliated them. I think it's possible--but there was an experiment someone ran a few years ago with a guy applying to jobs in both software development and management (while qualified for both and resumes optimized for each). One of the…

> and there's more genuine fear of hiring someone who can't fizzbuzz. I always hear this fear proclaimed but have never heard an actual story of a candidate failing to fizzbuzz, would love to hear an anecdote or two from anyone who has one.

I've never asked anyone fizzbuzz, but I have seen people badly flub very easy algorithm questions that are basically at the same level.

In every case it was because they over-complicated things. They came up with elaborate logic that they didn't need and then got lost and didn't quite get to a working implementation. Picture, say, starting to implement fizzbuzz using two tries and an associative array.

I would guess that a lot of the people I've seen bomb these kind of interview questions are actually good, capable programmers, but they just got overwhelmed by interview nerves and got lost.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#247

Post by ummonk »

smelendez wrote: post #164
illumin8 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed at Google (back in 2005, mind you) and I remember being asked a couple brain teaser questions like how to estimate the number of windows in NYC. I will say that out of my loop, there were only 2 interviewers that came across as intentionally mean, the rest were genuinely wanting to see how I solved problems and understand what my thought process was, which is what most interviewers should be attempting…

That question doesn't seem great. People who've spent more time in NYC will likely perform better, since they'll immediately start describing classes of buildings where they've spent time and generalizing, but how familiar you are with NYC is irrelevant to the job. Depending on your applicant pool, that might be correlated with a protected class, like race, gender, or national origin.

I don't think classes of buildings are that imporant. Just multiply the resident population by the number of windows per person. Just throwing a number out there, I'd estimate something like 10 windows per resident, counting residential and commercial.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#248

Post by sgustard »

ummonk wrote: post #245

To me, "Estimate how many windows are in New York" is a much more pleasant question to answer than "Are you a good listener?" or "Tell me about a time when you failed"...

When you're done hiring you've surrounded yourself with people who are good at estimating urban fenestration, but are poor listeners who blame others when they fail.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#249

Post by xsmasher »

ergothus wrote: post #161
jkingsbery wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TRUE STORY: I interviewed at Google earlier in my career. In one of the interviews, the interviewer asked me to recite/reconstruct off the top of my head the convex hull algorithm. I remembered the lectures in undergrad algo class where the professor talked about it. I remembered where in CLRS it was covered. I remembered the general outline (efficient algorithms are O(n log n), because you have to sort the points as…

As an interviewer I always advocate for coding problems to be done at the computer and to allow internet searches. On the rare occasions someone does a cut-and-paste solution, I then modify the problem to see if they understand the solution enough to make the necessary change. It's not perfect, but it seems as close to the actual work experience they are interviewing for. I interviewed at Facebook recently and was sh…

I do that; I ask candidates to code in notepad instead of an environment where you an compile, and it's intentional.

Failure come in three types - bad understanding (failure to understand the problem), bad planning (plan doesn't actually solve the problem), and bad implementation (failure to implement the plan correctly). The third type includes typos and off-by-one errors that I don't want the candidate to get hung up on. I might ask about an issue if I spot it, but if not I'd rather keep going on the more relevant parts of the solution.

Also, you can leave part of the solution in pseudocode without getting distracted by a bunch of squiggly underlines, and handwave away parts of the problem that we don't care about.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#250

Post by ummonk »

sgustard wrote: post #248
ummonk wrote: post #245

To me, "Estimate how many windows are in New York" is a much more pleasant question to answer than "Are you a good listener?" or "Tell me about a time when you failed"...

When you're done hiring you've surrounded yourself with people who are good at estimating urban fenestration, but are poor listeners who blame others when they fail.

I'm not saying that is the best question to ask an interviewee. I'm just saying it's the nicest of the three for me to be on the receiving end of.

(Although, to be clear, "are you a good listener?" is an absolutely terrible question.)

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